WHOSAY CEO Steve Ellis on Why Mobile Ad Spending Could More Than Double by 2020

Millennials are helping power an industry that could reach $72 billion in the next three years.

Steve Ellis thinks you should turn on your ad-blocker.

"Most ads are really bad," the WHOSAY co-founder and CEO admitted to Open Mobile Media, a sentiment echoed by an increasing number of advertising executives nowadays. "Banners failed to make an impression and pop-ups are terrible," seems to be the current consensus in the digital advertising industry.

According to a report by marketing data analytics firm Adroll, cited by Open Mobile Media, "the banner-era of digital advertising is nearing its end if it's not already dead and buried." The study found that click-through-rates today (0.1 percent) are almost forty times less than what they were at the time they were introduced in the 1990s.

Cue targeted mobile native-social ads, a space with fewer banners and pop-up ads and more "organic" videos and images skillfully embedded on the feeds of so-called social influencers: celebrities, stylists, makeup artists, musicians or just popular content creators who deliver a less intrusive and more relatable and trusting user experience.

Also known as influencer marketing, and at WHOSAY we call it influence marketing, the new channel offers "better viewership and a greater awareness, engagement, and CTR," according to Ellis. "The targeting capabilities that digital platforms offer to make native ads many times more effective than traditional digital ads," he added.

The new business model has helped WHOSAY control the conversation in social media and ad agencies, deliver a mean CTR of 15 percent from more than 200 successful campaigns, including the #Alldaybreakfast campaign for McDonald’s.

"With Google, Facebook and Amazon you can pretty much reach every single person in Europe and North America," Ellis explained. "They tell you what they like on Facebook, what they bought on Amazon and what they’re looking for on Google and YouTube."